E-reading device
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To me, it's debatable whether switching from hardcopy books to ebooks is a net environmental plus. However, living down here in Ecuador makes it a real pain in the butt to get hardcopies of technical books, especially in English. So far, I've been reading PDFs on my laptop, but the screen is too far from my face to really take advantage of its resolution. So, I'm considering either an iPad or some sort of Android tablet. A smaller form factor like Kindle Fire or Nexus 7 would be fine for material that can be reformatted on the fly, but I really prefer pre-formatted PDF ebooks. I'm afraid that a seven inch screen would be too small for most PDF ebooks. Does anyone here use a tablet to read PDFs? I'd appreciate hearing of your experiences.
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I do some reading on a lenovo convertible tablet, but it is really too heavy to hold in my hands. It is big enough for journal pdfs, but if the chart does not fit, too bad, scrolling is no substitute for unfolding. I do most reading on my phone. My daughter is starting to carry books on her phone, too, in preference to her kindle. Fine for text, but really need the quad HD projector for the graphics. -- rec -- On Feb 8, 2013 5:00 PM, "Gary Schiltz" <[hidden email]> wrote:
To me, it's debatable whether switching from hardcopy books to ebooks is a net environmental plus. However, living down here in Ecuador makes it a real pain in the butt to get hardcopies of technical books, especially in English. So far, I've been reading PDFs on my laptop, but the screen is too far from my face to really take advantage of its resolution. So, I'm considering either an iPad or some sort of Android tablet. A smaller form factor like Kindle Fire or Nexus 7 would be fine for material that can be reformatted on the fly, but I really prefer pre-formatted PDF ebooks. I'm afraid that a seven inch screen would be too small for most PDF ebooks. Does anyone here use a tablet to read PDFs? I'd appreciate hearing of your experiences. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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In reply to this post by Gary Schiltz-4
Nearly all my tech books are on my iPad. Its a bit heavy, especially compared to the kindle. But the battery life is fine and I find it great to use. But all the others are good too, I'm sure.
But one huge piece of advice: make sure whatever you do end up with has a reader for *all* the formats. OReilly for example gives you pdf, epub, mobi, and sometimes the apk format. And it does make quite a difference.
I hope the ebook format madness stops in the near future, Tom may be able to update us, but you should not get a device that will not read all the big three: pdf, mobi, epub (mobi is the kindle version and kindle reads it.) IIRC, the iPad book reader handles more than one format. And I think all devices have a pdf reader, either built in or as an app.
I would try whatever you are considering, especially the various file formats. I'd beware of the kindle books themselves, at least for tech books, they do not come in the multiple formats and have many silly errors that are slowly being fixed. The kindle app is available everywhere, even as a webapp.
-- Owen
On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 4:59 PM, Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote: To me, it's debatable whether switching from hardcopy books to ebooks is a net environmental plus. However, living down here in Ecuador makes it a real pain in the butt to get hardcopies of technical books, especially in English. So far, I've been reading PDFs on my laptop, but the screen is too far from my face to really take advantage of its resolution. So, I'm considering either an iPad or some sort of Android tablet. A smaller form factor like Kindle Fire or Nexus 7 would be fine for material that can be reformatted on the fly, but I really prefer pre-formatted PDF ebooks. I'm afraid that a seven inch screen would be too small for most PDF ebooks. Does anyone here use a tablet to read PDFs? I'd appreciate hearing of your experiences. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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In reply to this post by Gary Schiltz-4
I have been using an iPad for a while. I got a Kindle Fire, but found
it way too small; a Kindle DX but found the wireless downloads too much of a hassle, and also found it not very versatile. The iPad is heavier than I would like, but otherwise works fine. I will probably buy the next one just for the weight. I have not been so concerned about the environmental factor, although I suppose that is real. For me it is more the idea of storing a library compactly. (I just wish I could get all my physical books easily (and cheaply) converted to an electronic version.) PDFs are fine on my iPad. I use iAnnotate and find it very convenient. As to other formats, there are apps for reading anything I have been interested in, with the exception of CHM files. But I have not found anything I cared enough about to resolve the CHM format issue. Joe On 2/8/13 4:59 PM, Gary Schiltz wrote: > To me, it's debatable whether switching from hardcopy books to ebooks is a net environmental plus. However, living down here in Ecuador makes it a real pain in the butt to get hardcopies of technical books, especially in English. So far, I've been reading PDFs on my laptop, but the screen is too far from my face to really take advantage of its resolution. So, I'm considering either an iPad or some sort of Android tablet. A smaller form factor like Kindle Fire or Nexus 7 would be fine for material that can be reformatted on the fly, but I really prefer pre-formatted PDF ebooks. I'm afraid that a seven inch screen would be too small for most PDF ebooks. Does anyone here use a tablet to read PDFs? I'd appreciate hearing of your experiences. > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > -- "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." -- Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1913. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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In reply to this post by Owen Densmore
Thanks for your input, everyone. It sounds like I would be happy with an iPad. I haven't been able to try an iPad 3 or 4 yet - believe it or not, the newest iPad for sale here in Ecuador is the iPad 2, and it runs about $700 for a 16GB wireless model. So, stores aren't too big on letting you play with them. I have tried a few books on a friend's iPad 2, and was a bit bothered by the lower resolution (as compared with the 3 and 4) at typical book reading distance.
Echoing Roger's experience of reading on a phone, I do have an iPhone 4S, and find it surprisingly usable for re-formattable text. I've read around 20-30 novels on it, and with +3 reading glasses, I can read tech book sized PDFs in landscape mode (not that comfortably, though). Now, I guess my big decision is iOS vs Android. I used to be nearly an Apple fanboy, but am starting to view them as the new 800 pound gorilla. It just seems wrong to support a platform that only supports software sold and approved by a single vendor, that can only be developed in one language. Has anyone had a chance to see the Nexus 7 or 10? ;; Gary On Feb 9, 2013, at 1:30 PM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote: Nearly all my tech books are on my iPad. Its a bit heavy, especially compared to the kindle. But the battery life is fine and I find it great to use. But all the others are good too, I'm sure. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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In reply to this post by Joe Spinden
On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 12:26 PM, Joseph Spinden <[hidden email]> wrote:
<snip> (I just wish I could get all my physical books easily (and cheaply) converted to an electronic version.) If you buy your books on amazon, you may look forward to free kindle editions. Why do I say this? I recently got 74 mp3 albums for free because I bought them on amazon, and they've decided to make a great gesture toward their customers.
Naturally burning a CD is a lot easier than burning, oops, copying a book! Probably won't be free but maybe cheap enough to be tempting. I've got the reverse from the tech e-publishers recently: they are offering good deals on the hardcopy if you've bought the ebook. I've done that for one of them. But ebooks have another advantage: every new printing of the hardback gives free updates to the ebook owners. I've found that *really* useful, especially when the ebooks come out "still in beta". I've had over 25 updates, I'm sure.
-- Owen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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In reply to this post by Joe Spinden
I've been very happy with the Kindle ecology because I can pick up and leave off from any device -- phone, Kindle reader, desktop computer. I haven't found the format wars significant because, thanks to the wonders of modern electronics, there are readers and/or convertors for all formats. For example, Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com) will convert just about anything to anything. My wife stopped reading books on her iPad (iPad 1) and switched to a Kindle reader because the iPad was just too inconveniently heavy for reading.
There is however a problem that I'd like to see addressed. When I read a novel or most nonfiction, I read almost exclusively linearly, from start to finish. When I read/study/refer to a technical book (and I use quite a few technical books in my Kindle environment, whether or not they came from Amazon) I jump around a lot. The existing user ebook interfaces just don't cater to this kind of use.
A simple example with a technical book on paper: I stick one finger in the book at the page where I'm reading, and I flip back and forth, very fast, looking for something related, then go back to where I was. The equivalent is hard to do with an ebook. It's true that the ebook gives me something the paper book doesn't, a word-lookup search capability, but that's a clumsy scheme for the example I just gave. In fact, usually I wouldn't even know what search term to give, because my page flipping has more to do with visual pattern matching to a page that has a particular diagram. Even just the page-flipping itself is awkward. On an e-ink reader like the Kindle, page replots are a lot slower than my quick scans of a paper page.
The closest I've come to experiencing a usable interface is the Kindle reader on my desktop computer, which has a very large screen adequate for side-by-side two-page displays. There's a horizontal slider under the pages, and I can drag quickly forward and backward, with rapid page changes. Alas, there is no intelligent acceleration in the slider, so for a long book (i.e. most technical books) an infinitesimal slider jumps many pages. Sigh.
I don't claim to know exactly what a good interface would be for technical books, but I'm convinced that I haven't seen one. Incidentally, there seems to be some resistance from students to technical e-textbooks despite their much lower cost and the potential, sometimes realized, of including interactive elements, animations, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if the problem isn't exactly the same problem I encounter with technical books.
Bruce ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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In reply to this post by Gary Schiltz-4
I am referring specifically to the iPad 4, not any of the earlier
versions. I waited for the higher resolution screen before buying
any of these because I did not think I would be satisfied with a
lower resolution screen. Even then, I first tried the Kindle Fire,
but found the screen size too small for me.
I sympathize with your dislike of the closed platform, but, for me, the extensive app availability for the Apple was decisive. As to Owen's latest: I can only hope (though I doubt it). I buy all of my books through Amazon (or through Amazon marketplace). As to Bruce's comments: on weight: I agree. that is why I am looking for the next iteration of the iPad. on flipping: I think my iPad is faster than the e-ink readers. That might even get better in the next generation with a faster processor. (which might also be true for future generation Kindles..) I have tried using bookmarks, et cetera in iAnnotate. This works when I want to go to the index. For visual recognition, only fast flipping would work. Nothing is completely satisfactory, but it is not so bad.. Joe On 2/9/13 1:48 PM, Gary Schiltz wrote:
Thanks for your input, everyone. It sounds like I would be happy with an iPad. I haven't been able to try an iPad 3 or 4 yet - believe it or not, the newest iPad for sale here in Ecuador is the iPad 2, and it runs about $700 for a 16GB wireless model. So, stores aren't too big on letting you play with them. I have tried a few books on a friend's iPad 2, and was a bit bothered by the lower resolution (as compared with the 3 and 4) at typical book reading distance. -- "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." -- Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1913. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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In reply to this post by Bruce Sherwood
The page interface is a pain. When I lose my place in a fat ebook, it is very hard to find it again. I think they need to keep an infinite stack of bookmarks for each page visited, so I can scroll back and forth through my history. That would let me find my place after accidentally scrolling a ~100 pages forward or backward, and would keep a most recently used page stack for multiple pages in a reference book. Switching between phone & desktop browser in google books is painless, too, and the phone and browser will play kindle books, as well. I appreciate google's efforts to make public domain texts freely available. Apple and Amazon seem more inclined to sell me new e-editions of public domain works, but maybe I haven't tried hard enough to access the classics with them. -- rec -- On Feb 9, 2013 2:15 PM, "Bruce Sherwood" <[hidden email]> wrote:
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In reply to this post by Joe Spinden
You are of course right; the slow replot is just with e-ink. But the other problems seem to me to be generic to all displays and all current user interfaces. My guess is that zero consideration has been given in user interface design to the needs of readers of technical books, including students.
Bruce On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 2:40 PM, Joseph Spinden <[hidden email]> wrote:
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In reply to this post by Roger Critchlow-2
Maybe it would be interesting and even useful to mock up an interface that would actually serve our needs. It's even conceivable that if we did it right (and watched volunteers trying to use our interface) that it would be an improvement even for linear reading. Bruce On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 3:03 PM, Roger Critchlow <[hidden email]> wrote:
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In reply to this post by Gary Schiltz-4
I bought an iPad 1 specifically for reading, since much of the technical stuff I read is off the net, formatted for a 3-ring binder. Also, nothing beats PDF for mathematics. It has worked extremely well. I have virtually stopped using my printer, which I used to print out manuals, sections of source code, etc. The iPad has become the most important component of my paperless office; the ScanSnap is the second.
Retina resolution would be nice, but I get along without it. The iPad mini might be nice, but full letter- or A4- sized PDFs might be bit harder to read. My recommendation would be to stay above 9 inches. --Barry MacKichan On Feb 8, 2013, at 4:59 PM, Gary Schiltz wrote: > To me, it's debatable whether switching from hardcopy books to ebooks is a net environmental plus. However, living down here in Ecuador makes it a real pain in the butt to get hardcopies of technical books, especially in English. So far, I've been reading PDFs on my laptop, but the screen is too far from my face to really take advantage of its resolution. So, I'm considering either an iPad or some sort of Android tablet. A smaller form factor like Kindle Fire or Nexus 7 would be fine for material that can be reformatted on the fly, but I really prefer pre-formatted PDF ebooks. I'm afraid that a seven inch screen would be too small for most PDF ebooks. Does anyone here use a tablet to read PDFs? I'd appreciate hearing of your experiences. > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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In reply to this post by Roger Critchlow-2
I just tested a bit on my iPad. I use a number of apps: Kindle, iBook, GoodReader, Safari To Go, ...
At least the Kindle and GoodReader have an apparently unlimited ( >= 10) stack of positions from which you did a jump. This is kind of an "undo" for navigation; I didn't see any evidence of a "redo" operation, which you would need for going back and forth between two positions, but setting bookmarks would work for this. For classics, I suggest Browse/Free on the iBooks store and www.freekindlebooks.org for epub and mobi formats of the Gutenberg project's books. --Barry On Feb 9, 2013, at 3:03 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
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